Points of Pedagogy

For lack of a better phrase, I call this link learning – a way of making unmemorable facts un-unrememberable. The basis of this is to relate any information that they ‘just have to know’ to a funny action, thought, or story so that it is no longer just information, but a vivid memory. To illustrate this idea, allow me to bore you (and then thrill you!) with an example. All around you, at this very second, is a long (as students would say) process called the Calvin Cycle (discovered by the greatly named, lately dead, Melvin Calvin). This involved several stages: First, 5-carbon ribulose-1, 3-bisphosphate (RuBP) is reduced by the addition of carbon dioxide, resulting in the formation of two 3-carbon 3-phospoglycerate molecules (GP), that are then converted by hydrolysis of ATP and oxidation of NADPH, to 3-carbon glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate (GALP). This can then be used to re-form 5-carbon ribulose bisphosphate or form 6-carbon glucose. If you made it past/can remember more than one stage, do come and enquire about Biology A-level in 1968, because it sounds right up your street.

Now see if it’s any better with this way of learning it: My friend, Ruby P, was feeling funny and so she took some CO2. However, this didn’t make her feel better so she went to her GP who gave her some NADPH and ATP, which she drank in one big GALP. This then made her feel much better so she was just Ruby P again.

Remember any more? You may only know some of Ruby’s story, but it will stick with you longer than a list of compound names, and with practice you will get it all. Both of the above are ways of describing the cycle, but one links the cycle to memorable imagery, while the other leads to loss of attention after around 5 seconds, thoughts of lunch after around 10 seconds, and apocalyptic panic when the teacher asks you to remember any of it one minute later.

7 – Where possible, don’t procrastinate

At first this may seem at odds with playing the long game, but shush. Hold that thought. Keep your bilious, knee-jerk reactions to yourself mister. There is putting off a job for tomorrow for the sake of your sanity, and there is ticking a task off your To Do List before it becomes part of your Reasons to be Overwhelmed List. *Cliché alert* As Mr Micawber puts it in David Copperfield, “never do tomorrow what you can do today” *Cliché alert*. I would not say ‘never’ here (see point 6), but I would say if it’s a short and menial task then just get it out of the way. The psychological weight of each point on your To Do List is too heavy to afford procrastination.

8 – Think more, plan less

OK so you’ve managed to strike your work-life balance and you’re planned and marked for a while yet. No last-minute panics for you for at least a week. What do you do with your frees and evenings? Just stop? If you’re like me, you’ll sit down and think ‘Brilliant. Now if I just work at my usual rate I’ll stay this far ahead all year’. Not a jot of it! What a naïve fool I am every single time. I’ll keep working, but absurdly my rate of output is now a fraction of what it was. It’s Parkinson’s Law in action – work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. The problem is always the same. I replace lesson planning with just making elaborate resources. Give me three minutes to plan a double lesson and it could challenge Outstanding. Give me two weeks and you’ll get the most solid resources in the world and sod-all of a lesson to build around it. When you sit down to plan a lesson just think: what do they need to know by the end; how am I going to show that they’ve learned it; and what is the simplest way for me to go about fulfilling the answer to these two questions? 3 minutes more thinking time per lesson will save you hours and hours of writing and printing resources over the course of a year.

9 – Make friends with people who aren’t teachers

Sort of speaks for itself really. Good advice for anyone that.

10 – Surround yourself with support

Teaching is a collaborative game. In practice I haven’t found it to be half as collaborative as it should be, but there are certainly avenues. I don’t see that it makes much sense for there to be around 500,000 teachers in the UK alone, with much overlap in their areas, all reinventing the wheel for themselves. Your subject almost certainly has thousands, if not tens of thousands, of teachers all working towards the same exam. Of course we’re all delicate little snowflakes trying to exert our individuality, but the workload is obscene if you don’t collaborate. So whatever your institution, whatever your subject: share, share, share with others. Share resources with those in the same subject, share tips and techniques with anybody else, generally take the advice of others and don’t be too proud to ask for help. It’s genuinely more satisfying lending a hand than asking for one, so in many ways you’re doing your altruistic brothers and sisters a favour.

Firstly: is it better to read the same material over and over, or to test yourself over and over?

The simple answer is test yourself. The long answer (because why not?) involves some ground-breaking research by Roediger & Karpicke (2006). In their study, participants were placed into one of two groups: either ‘Study, Study’ (SS) or ‘Study, Test’ (ST). Both groups were presented with a prose passage and were asked to read it as many times as they could over a 7-minute period. After, the ‘Study, Study’ group were given a further 7 minutes to read the passage over and over; whereas the ‘Study, Test’ group were given a blank page and asked to recall as much of the passage as possible – without having to worry about order or correct spellings.

Their recall was then tested after a delay of either 5 minutes, 2 days or 1 week. Although recall was better in the SS group after 5 minutes (fig.1), it was significantly better in the ST group over 2 days and 1 week – conditions which much more closely mirror lesson gaps.

This study seems to suggest that students, particularly during revision time, would be better served by testing themselves instead of simply re-reading the material until it is fixed into their brain. It also argues for regular recap sessions during lessons to promote free recall where possible.

  Secondly: what simple memory improvement strategies are out there for me?

Well this one is particularly interesting. There are plenty. There are a lot of questions to ask yourself before deciding which route to take however. For instance, what kind of information are you looking to memorise? Are you creative and do you enjoy devising new scenarios, or would you rather have a more robotic form? How much information do you need to remember? Well since this isn’t actually a conversation and you’re just reading something that was written perhaps a long time ago, let’s just try and cover the key bases.

Simply put, memory improvement strategies (or mnemonics – the first ‘m’ is silent) come in two main forms: verbal and visual. The most common format is verbal. This includes writing songs, making rhymes, coming up with funny acronyms and acrostics, and just generally transforming the words themselves into a more memorable selection of noises. Let’s take rhyme and song for instance: how many songs do you know all of the lyrics to, by heart? 50? 100? 500? Either way you look at it, it’s a hell of a lot. And how much of the textbook or set text from which you’re teaching could you quote so accurately? I’m guessing it’s not as much. Songs and rhymes have been used since time immemorial as a way to remember and pass on key information – so why not try it with the continents of the world or the properties of magnesium? You may even remember The Elements Song, and if you can sing it all then you’re better at this than I am.

That’s the easier stuff, and I’d highly recommend trying it in your classroom as a plenary. Perhaps even share the best ones and repeat them often throughout the year.

Now let’s move onto the slightly more difficult techniques. The sort of techniques Derren Brown mastered in order to learn the entire London A-Z (including index references and page numbers) or the bus routes in every town he performs. These are the visual mnemonics, and we’ll look at just two for now: The Method of Loci and Narrative Chaining.

First though we need something to memorise. Try doing it without a memory improvement strategy. Read the words through three times. Wait 30 seconds and then try to recall as many as you can in order. Trust me, if you actually try these out for real you’ll get to see the benefits immediately:

  The Method of Loci

Perhaps the most common and straightforward visual mnemonic, for this one you just need to visualise a place or a journey which is very familiar to you. It could be your bedroom, your classroom or your route to the bus stop (for me, it’s always the latter). If it’s a specific place, you have to visual yourself looking around that place following a specific journey (i.e. start at the door and look clockwise around the room). What you have to do as you go through this visualisation is simply place each one of the words at a significant point. If you do start at the door, imagine that you have a giant goldfish painted on it. Then, if you look next to your desk, imagine there’s a cup on there with an orange in it. This cup is stopping your favourite balloon from falling off the desk onto your stuffed penguin, and so on. Take 5 minutes to create a journey like this using each of the 20 words. Again, wait 30 seconds and then see again how many items you can recall in order.

How did you do? Was it an improvement?

Narrative Chaining

Now this one is my favourite. It takes ever so slightly longer than Method of Loci, but boy is it effective. I taught a class of Year 12s this method in the first month and presented them with a list of 25 words to try it out on. I’ve just tested myself now (8 months later) and I got them all. In order. And I’m an idiot! In fact, I first read about this in a book by Derren Brown published in 2006 in which he asked the reader to try it out with 15 items in a list, and I can still remember those in order.

OK, so the process is simple, and can even be combined with the Method of Loci. As the name suggests, what you do is make up a story involving each of the items on the list, who should appear in the order that they are on the list. The important thing to keep in mind is that the story should be as bizarre as possible. This should make it more memorable.

Let’s take the bedroom example from Method of Loci and develop on that. So we got up to the penguin. Let’s say that the balloon falls onto your stuffed penguin who, through nothing more than indignant rage, manages to find consciousness. In his anger, he takes up a pair of scissors and bursts the balloon. Little did he know, the reason you were keen to stop it falling on the penguin is because it’s filled with tar, which flows from the hole all over your prize-winning cauliflower and the door handle. Equally apoplectic with rage, the door handle also achieves consciousness and – now fascinated by its new sensations – asks what it’s all about. It’s become a philosopher. And so on. And so on.

It may seem to take longer than the other strategies, but if it is an equation or a list of historical events in chronological order that you simply cannot get the marks without memorising, then it is invaluable.

As somebody who exclusively teaches exam classes (and A Levels at that), I know the benefits of having an end goal with which to motivate students. In the run-up to their 2014 exams, I could get away with the most tedious, content-heavy lessons imaginable, all under the banner of ‘Things you just need to know for the exam’. Distracted or unmotivated students could, for the most part, be rallied with cries of ‘It’s your exam in three weeks!’ - An invaluable asset for any teacher. This admonishment is less effective however when exams are further away. How can I motivate their inner competitive spirit when exams aren’t for another 7 months? Even Nostradamus would struggle with that sort of forethought.

The answer for me was tapping into this competitive nature. I tried to picture me at my most competitive: what was I usually doing? Who was around me at the time? I play football regularly and am not averse to a drink-off. Then it hit me: pub quiz! I’m at my most competitive not out on the football field, but during a pub quiz. Or any quiz for that matter. Break out the Trivial Pursuit and you’ll see a side of me you probably won’t like. Scrabble you say? Then you’d better hide the good China, son. The prize doesn’t matter; it’s just about showing off.

Well that’s all well and good, but Waddington’s never produced a Psychology version of Monopoly. Alright then, I’ll just have to make my own. OK, so maybe not my own Monopoly board. But I do have students and a stopwatch (well, the timer on my phone); maybe I’ll play BBC Radio 4’s ‘Just A Minute’ and see if we can’t make good use of their competitive nature.

So I did. The third lesson I had with my year 12 class was surprisingly productive and I was stuck for a plenary, so I whipped out the trusty stopwatch and board marker combo, assigned each table a team name and away we went with me fulfilling the role of Nicholas Parsons, keeping a tally and announcing the winning group. This went on for a few lessons before I realised that we should perhaps be keeping a running score. The groups were already differentiated; I could maintain them for the whole year provided there were no significant problems. Over the weeks this tally turned into an out-and-out points system, students could choose their own team names and before I knew it, I’d created some sort of sectarian war. But a good, conducive-to-learning sort of war. Points were docked for lateness and missed homeworks, awarded for correct answers and good practice, entirely at my caprice. I even introduced a Word of the Day feature which, if they could use it naturally in conversation throughout the course of the lesson, was worth 5 points.

But then, I had a dilemma on my hands. What were these points for? Where were they leading? Could I really maintain their interest in the competition without a suitable prize? This, as it turned out, was fairly simple. I decided that the winning group by the end of term would have a whole double lesson to plan for themselves – our last lesson before the holidays. They could prepare a lecture on something they’re passionate about; they could make everyone design Christmas decorations and dance the lambada; they could stick on a movie and fall asleep in the back or bring in an old Atari and make everyone play Tetris for 120 satisfying minutes. Provided they stayed within the laws of the land, and had a budget of exactly 70p, we were fine. As it transpired, even this was unnecessary planning. By the time we’d decided on a winner for the term, the winning team didn’t even care what we did. Ultimately, they let a different group choose what film to put on.

But the passion and the ferocity of the competition during the term was so fierce! Why did they care, if it wasn’t about the prize? Like I said, humans are a competitive bunch. In fact, what did I care about their motivation? As long as it gets them remembering Staub’s stages of genocide or Bowlby’s Maternal Deprivation Hypothesis as though their lives depended on it, I’m happy just playing the host to this bizarre gameshow.

In the end I realised that the easiest way to get the best out of my students was not to change who they are, but to use their tendencies as a positive boon. Young people in particular are brimming with passion and a competitive spirit, so why not just use that and redirect it towards the things you need them to be passionate and competitive about? I’ll phrase it in the form of a charming metaphor: If you’ve had a few too many shandies and can feel your guts about to be purged, your friends don’t try to tape your mouth shut and tell you not to blow. They chuck you out of the taxi and point you in the direction of a suitable hedgerow. They’re not saying don’t do it; they’re giving you a more suitable, and less costly, outlet.